[License-discuss] what would de-listing of licenses look like?

[Bruce Perens]

The justification for de-listing presently accepted licenses is that:

1. They are ambiguous or likely to perform in court in unexpected ways, 
should they ever be litigated. And thus they are harmful to their users. 
De-listing is a prompt to the organization that originally created the 
license to replace it with an accepted license or to submit a new 
version with greater legal competence in its construction. These would 
be the "crayon" licenses, mostly, those written without legal counsel.

2. They don't comply with the OSD and were accepted in error.

3. They are both redundant /and /rarely used.

Those are the only justifications. You don't get to de-list something 
because you don't like its politics.

I think you need to have a committee review a proposal to de-list, with 
arguments from the submitter regarding the problems in the license, and 
with advice from an attorney on whether the suggested problems are 
really problems.

     Thanks

     Bruce

On 03/06/2013 08:23 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 11:48 AM, Richard Fontana
> <fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
>> The Frameworx license is one of those OSI-approved licenses that I
>> believe was approved "in haste". If OSI had such a procedure, I would
>> recommend that the Frameworx license be reviewed for de-listing.
> Any recommendations on what such a process would look like, Richard?
> I'm not super-enthused about the idea, but don't want to rule out
> anything without at least some discussion.
>
> Luis
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> License-discuss mailing list
> License-discuss at opensource.org
> http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss

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